Paid Content

4 Tips for Creating a Viral Branded Microsite

A website has so many components and pages — contact info, FAQs, product descriptions, company values, team bios — that sometimes you need a separate, dedicated site to highlight a certain product or promotion. Enter the microsite. When trying to figure out if a microsite is a good investment of time and resources, consider your goals, think of an idea that makes sense for your brand and keep it simple.

1. Be On Brand

When Wrigley gum brand Juicy Fruit wanted to get social, it played up one of its key flavor notes: sweetness.

"Question: What’s sweeter than getting a sloe-eyed mythical creature to croon chartbusters of yesteryear (“Gangsta’s Paradise”) or topical tunes of today (“Sorry You Lost Your Phone”) to one’s Facebook friends? Answer: Nothing, besides Juicy Fruit," says Stephen Goldblatt, executive creative director and partner of Evolution Bureau, the agency that developed the site. In short, the goal of Serenading Unicorn was "to create a 'sweet' form of social currency for the brand to share on friends’ walls."

The unicorn was "indescribably sweet," and branded serenades allowed people to share some sweetness with their friends by posting videos on other's Facebook walls. The videos lived on the Serenading Unicorn microsite, and there was a Facebook app, too. People could choose from more than a dozen themed videos and post it on friends' walls with a personal message. The videos racked up more than 1.4 million YouTube views since May.

Then there's the Burton Bag Check, a choose-your-own adventure microsite, which is appropriate, since Burton is all about discovery and exploration. Because Burton's bags have many permutations and a bevy of features, they found that the Bag Check tool was "one of the best ways for users to discover a bag that was perfect for them," says Amanda Wormann, Burton's social media manager. "We’ve made a lot of these bag styles for a while now, but it wasn’t until creating the Bag Check site that users were able to discover the information and features in a fun way."

2. Determine Your Goals

Burton wanted to bring awareness to their extensive line of bags — everyone pigeonholes the brand as snow apparel, but the company offers many accessories, too. The choose-your-own adventure shopping experience flaunts the versatility of Burton's offerings and was timed with back-to-school shopping.

"Oftentimes, people aren’t aware that Burton has such a next-level collection of bags for everything from an overnight trip to New York to a three-week mission around the world," says Wormann. The bags have a variety of features, including skateboard wheels, packable laundry bags, insulation to keep up to 30 cans cold, and speakers that are iPod-compatible. "With such a huge variety of bags, it was really important to create a microsite like Bag Check so our customers could easily discover all these features and find the perfect bag for them."

The choose-your-own-adventure theme put the experience in the hands of the consumers and made them feel like they found the bag that was perfect for them and had all the functional specs they were looking for, down to how many beers (or soda...) they'd want to carry in it.

Aussie winery Mollydooker created the Label Our Lefty microsite for a different reason — to crowdsource the name of its new wine. "We wanted to find a name, to make our customers feel involved and to reach more new people and get more names on our mailing list," says Sarah Marquis, Mollydooker's CEO and winemaker. The idea grew out of a successful promotion a few years back, when the mailing list recipients were asked to help name the brand's new charity wine, which was eventually dubbed Sip It Forward. Mollydooker received 2,000 entries, and the team was excited by customers wanting to be a part of it. "When we decided to produce this Sparkling Shiraz, which is planned to be our last wine to add to our portfolio, it was the perfect chance to run something like this," Marquis says.

"They wanted to use social media to make it happen, so we designed a microsite that resembled a contest but didn't have the usual voting mechanism," says Rick Bakas of Bakas Media, which developed Label Our Lefty. Instead of casting a traditional vote, each person could submit up to ten names, and each Facebook Like would resemble a vote. But Marquis would choose the final name, influenced in part by the number of Likes. This time around, with the dedicated site and the grand prize being a trip for two to Australia to hang out at Mollydooker, the winery received almost 6,000 entries, and Bakas says the microsite got 80,000 pageviews and 14,000 unique visits.

"I suppose we knew it would be successful because we were going to make it go viral through Facebook and Twitter, and we put a lot of effort into creating a website specifically for this purpose," says Marquis.

3. Let Your Freak Flag Wave

Most things that go viral are a little quirky — just look at Volkswagen's Fun Theory and the baby dancing to Beyonce's "Single Ladies." Don't be afraid to be a little different — people will be more inclined to share and talk about something that's new, innovative and slightly bizarre.

That's why Evolution Bureau chose a unicorn for the Juicy Fruit campaign — "It had the right combination of cute, creepy and cool," says Goldblatt. And the agency appealed to every kind of consumer by having the unicorn sing a wide range of musical stylings, including Doo Wop, Hip Hop and Pop. Then, of course, EVB recruited high profile talent like Sarah Silverman and YouTube star Keenan Cahill — who have strong social media followings — to further the unicorn's reach.

4. Keep It Simple

If you're building out an entirely new site for a campaign, it doesn't need to be overly complicated. After all, you're building it to further your brand in some way — it's a place in which to communicate a brand idea and bring it to life in a new and fun way. Execution should be simple and artful because people are busy — if there are too many steps or something's unclear, they'll click away. "Respect their time by making your site easy to use and by making the user experience gratifying," Goldblatt advises.

For Serenading Unicorn, the mission and communication is clear. "There is no question as to why you are there and what you can do," says Goldblatt. "The site is the hub where senders can access the full music videos along with 15 mini-serenades, which are 20- to 40-second videos for everyday milestones, such as 'Your Haircut is Growing on Me,' 'I Heard it’s Your Birthday' and 'Happy Hump Day.'" There's nothing complicated about that.

Lastly, across the board, it's clear that social sharing is important — you want users to feel a connection to the product and tell all of their friends about it. It just takes a few clicks to send a personalized, high-quality unicorn serenade to a friend, meaning that the payoff is big compared to the effort required. And with Bag Check, users can easily share their choices on Facebook so friends can see their favorite bag picks, and of course, "voting" was done via Facebook, to engage social audiences.

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